Peaking?

It's hard to stick with the intentions of August lolling when I pay the least little bit of attention to the news. A BBC article on a French report on Peak Oil woke me right up out of my doldrums. Peak Oil Enters Mainstream Debate. It may be the first mention of Peak Oil in a government report, and it isn't exactly pretty:

A French government report on the global oil industry forecasts a possible peak in world production as early as 2013... The report 'The Oil Industry 2004' takes a long look at future production and supply issues......the French report, perhaps the most open government dossier yet, questions the viability of long term oil production.

When I wrote my first post on this blog I mentioned that Global Warming and Peak Oil were the two topics at the top of my list to report on. I've ridden the first one quite a ways, and now it looks like time to get going on the second. I'll begin with a definition: From PeakOil.org:

Peak oil is the point in time when extraction of oil from the earth reaches its highest point and then begins to decline. We won't be able to say with certainty when we have reached peak oil until after the fact. Many experts say we have already reached the peak. Others say not yet, but within the next few years.

Hypotheses on this vary from end of the century to as soon as 2007. You can roam the Peak Oil sites on the internet and find quite a variety of timelines. One of the best sites I have found is the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. It's a UK site, as are many to most of them that I've searched. Here in this country we seem to be in our usual state of somnolence and denial. The implications for all of this are so huge, that we need to wake up pretty quickly, take our heads out of the sand and start to plan for a very different sort of future. Browse the two sites in this post, and I'll be back with more pretty soon.

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